Why Rulers Can't Govern - See: Morsi, Mohamed

WWPD?  What Would Pharaoh Do?

Egypt's first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, is out, deposed by his country's generals for failing to address the Egyptian people's unrest.  It turns out Morsi's downfall might have been the result of his spending too much time trying to rule and far too little time on the business of governing - the common failing of authoritarians, even our own.

Yet Morsi's ouster won't really solve anything.  Nafeez Ahmed, writing in The Guardian, says Egypt is beset by troubles, deep rooted and intractable, that lie in wait for Morsi's successor:

Morsi's key problem was that he had spent most of his energies on consolidating the reach of his party, the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than dealing with Egypt's entrenched social, economic and political problems. Indeed, Egyptian unrest is the consequence of a fatal cocktail of structural failures rooted in an unsustainable global model of industrial civilisation - addicted to fossil fuels, wedded fanatically to casino capitalism, and convinced, ostrich-like, that somehow technology alone will save us.

Egypt's oil production peaked in 1996, and since then has declined by around 26%. Having moved from complete food self-sufficiency since the 1960s, to excessive dependence on imports subsidised by oil revenues (now importing 75% of its wheat), declining oil revenues have increasingly impacted food and fuel subsidies. As high food prices are generally underpinned by high oil prices - because energy accounts for over a third of the costs of grain production - this has further contributed to surging global food prices.

Food price hikes have coincided with devastating climate change impacts in the form of extreme weather in key food-basket regions. Since 2010, we have seen droughts and heat-waves in the US, Russia, and China, leading to a dramatic fall in wheat yields, on which Egypt is heavily dependent. The subsequent doubling of global wheat prices - from $157/metric tonne in June 2010 to $326/metric tonne in February 2011 - directly affected millions of Egyptians, who already spend about 40% of their income on food. 
That helped trigger the events that led to the fall of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 - but the same configuration of factors is worsening.

Egypt has suffered from horrendous debt levels at about 80.5% of its GDP, far higher than most other countries in the region. Inequality is also high, widening over the last decade in the wake of neoliberal 'structural adjustment' reforms implemented throughout the region since the 1980s with debilitating effects, including contraction of social welfare, reduction of wages, and lack of infrastructure investment.

Devastating climate change impacts, systemic inequality, wage contraction, high food prices, lack of infrastructure investment, crippling debt - it's the classic recipe for a perfect failed state, just add water and stir.

It's easy to fault Morsi.  He is, after all, an Islamist and we rarely pass up a shot at those types.  But his predecessor, Mubarak, was no Islamist and was brought down by these same factors and Mubarak was backed by Washington and controlled the military and the state security apparatus.   Morsi's successor probably won't be an Islamist but that doesn't mean he (and, yes, it will be a "he") will have some magic wand to make the country's enormous challenges go away.   In fact he'll probably have to focus on preventing a civil war and preventing another military coup and that might leave precious little time for governing.

Egypt is in some ways a microcosm of our global challenges. With the age of cheap oil well and truly behind us, an age of climate extremes and population growth ahead, we should expect increasing food prices for the foreseeable future. This in turn will have consequences. For the last few years, the food price index has fluctuated above the critical threshold for probability of civil unrest.

Unless Egypt's leaders and activists begin taking stock of the convergence of crises unraveling the social fabric, their country faces a permanent future of intensifying turmoil.

And that lesson, in a world facing rising food, water and energy challenges, is one no government can afford to ignore.


Can you say "Somalia on the Nile"?